In Wisconsin, it’s almost three o’ clock. I’m sitting at a coffee shop, Racy D’lenes, in the city I was born in. I used to come here when I was barely a teenager, you could smoke then, indoors, and I remember having to change my shirt, wash my hands, etc. before coming home at night where my parents would inevitably ask me if I’d been smoking. I’d tell them no. It was a lot like any other coffee shop in those days, filled with young, freak kids in strange clothes with bad hair cuts, cigarettes and chess boards, and always someone writing, and always someone reading, either on a ragged couch in some dark corner of the room, or staring out the sunny front-wall window where I am now. It was the kind of low lit, one room coffeehouse that, at thirteen, you felt proud simply saying you had been there, especially when everyone else your age was either doing homework at their parent's house or bleating at the high school football game, sitting on the cold steel bleachers like an asshole. Likely, what brought me here at thirteen is nothing more or less then what brings me here right now. There wasn’t anything to do. We hadn’t gotten into drugs yet, and the girls who hung out with us weren’t giving it up, not completely, so as a young boy I needed to be somewhere where I felt my presence validated, my name spelled out for me by the eccentric character of my surroundings. For reasons specific to the cultural anxieties of a teenager, I wanted to be a freak. And Racy's, in the late nineties, is where the freaks of Eau Claire would congregate, a little back alley coffee shop on the tree lined banks of the murky Chippewa River. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember.
Well somehow fifteen years has passed and I’m back in Eau Claire again, still with nothing better to do, still sitting, writing, still staring out the window where today the low trees bend along the riverside, stirred by a slow and humid breeze. In some ways the coffee shop has changed, in other ways, not so much. Some of the old regulars have stuck around, the same slightly crazy middle aged men, usually recovered something or anothers and almost always a little Jesusy, who’ve been coming here for god knows how long, the bartenders from the Joynt across the street who walk in ragged the morning after and still remember you, the drinks you ordered and the girl that you were with, a couple specific others. Furthermore, the important, general consistencies are still intact. The baristas are still beautiful and young, more so now than ever, I suspect, even the boys, and the latest good record is always playing from the corner stereo. But for the most part, the people I am used to being here are not. They’ve all moved on as I have, to bigger cities, to other scenes. Still, even in their absence, in the presence of these strangers who feel familiar, echoes of other faces I have known, I can’t help but look around and gauge the changes in a town I rather selfishly expect to stay the same. The old grocery on the corner has turned into a fitness center. The record store has closed. There’s more tattoo shops, three, I think. And downtown, while not exactly what it could be, is coming slowly back to life. In many ways the city has gotten hipper. I don’t mean this as a complaint, simply as an observation that struck me as I walked down Water Street coming to this café.
Perhaps this is to be anticipated. Just west of here, Minneapolis, MN, Eau Claire's older, more populated, bigger sister, just got voted the hippest city in the country. Hometown music heroes Bon Iver are the darlings of both NPR and Pitchfork, to say nothing of the Billboard music charts where their new album just debuted at number two in the nation, if not the world. Even Eau Claire, it seems, is not impervious to transformation. The grocery and record stores aside, culture, especially youth culture, changes, and we are always in the middle of it, participating in our own evolution.
To my knowledge, Norman Mailer first described the phenomenon in an essay, “The White Negro.” In it, he posited the hipster as a kind of negative, white reaction to the rigid conformity of America in the early fifties, “a new breed of… urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts.” This is not to say that urban white kids were trying to be black, rather, the position of a marginal, disenfranchised minority became appropriated by a group who were not, by most standards, typically considered oppressed. The beats picked up on this and ran with it; in the sixties the hippies exploited it; punk took it to near annihilating extremes; and now, all these decades later, after all those transformations, hipness has, for the most part, left the margins of the culture while still positioning itself as something meaningfully other. In its most recent reincarnation, hipness has, for the most part, become somewhat of a marketable caricature of itself, easily predictable, easily explained. It would be hard to argue, I think, against the possibility that we live in a world where almost everything has been accepted, watered down, and sold back to us. Resistance, it seems, has been commoditized, and in such a climate there’s no such thing as freaks. What makes one an outsider, the clothes one wears, the music one creates and listens to, the books one reads, the way one holds oneself, is, in some sense, a reaction, albeit superficial, against something, who knows what, but we have abstract names for it like Culture, or Society, or America, whose defining elements are seen as inhospitable. This particular position and method of definition, despite the astuteness of its observations, is also alienating. By positing the rest of the world, excluding one's small corner of it, as absolutely other, the outsider perpetuates a world in which we are radically apart. Rooted in this dichotomy, and to a large extent, reliant on it, the position of the hipster ironically risks a certain amount of social predictability, opposing, often for the sake of opposition, a multitude of various polarizing forces, social by nature and historical in breadth, which exist primarily as cultural abstractions to measure identity against. Admittedly, at times it feels it is all that one can do to hold one’s own against a culture and a country gone astray. In this light, music, poetry, fashion, drugs, and any other activity which one could locate outside the normal world of the predictable, becomes, as a matter of perceived necessity, an act of self defense and, ideally, of definition, an ill-fated quest for authenticity at the level of the individual, trying to say that one is this or one is that, while at the same time implying the opposite, that one is not this or not that.
The problem when I was younger, and that I still struggle with today, is that youthful angst and cynicism came easier to me than did the heavy selflessness of love, the meandering complexities of empathy, and so being took their places at the forefront of my emotions, the unclear lens through which the world appeared uncaring and austere. It took a lot of selfless action, a lot of effort on the part of people who both knew and didn’t know me, but who came through, in some form or another, and took it upon themselves to connect their lives to my life before I could begin to reverse the process. At the same time, however, I am not a person who believes that anger, aggression, sadness, discontent, etc., attitudes and general ways of being which constituted much of the punk experience, should ever be negated or done away with, not completely. The fiercer aspects of our nature are far too influential and full for that, too important, too adept at articulating the intensity of which life is capable for any of the weak-minded sentiments of pop-songs, bad poetry, and blissed-out love mongers to be taken seriously. I have little patience for such sentiments. They belittle the full complexity of being human and are quite possibly the reason a word as strong and necessary as love no longer resonates with any force in a world where it’s used with such indiscriminate indiscretion. I know this because I used to do the very thing within the lexicon of anger, lashing out at anything American for the simple sake of positioning myself against it, diminishing the meanings inherent in my vocabulary (punk, freedom, resistance, etc.) by sheer misuse and utter disregard. In this way, as well as many others, punk rock undid itself being un-sustainably concerned with what it wasn’t, over stating itself, and, in the end, not being anything at all. The stance of the hipster loses its validity, its substance, when his or her unique perspective as an outsider ceases to be either outside or unique. It broke my heart to watch punk rock become assimilated into the very culture it vowed so passionately to dismantle. But it happened. I see it all around me now; the streets are full of it. The tight black pants, studded belts, tattooed sleeves, and carefully disordered hair (to make a sweeping, artificial generalization) that used to represent the position of the outsider, or at least some superficial affinity to the oppressed, are so mechanically prefabricated, so easily achieved, they approach the silent insignificance of the quotidian. We’re all too hip to matter, myself included, and so we don’t.
When the culture assimilates your position, your dress, your language, and every other method of definition, the question, at some point, becomes a matter of maintaining your anonymity as an outsider without falling into the pitfall of defining your position as simply antithetical to the position of the inside, to be more than a reaction. Is this possible? Any outsider, be they political or cultural, upon the inauguration of his or her success, places themselves in a position of power, enters society, and necessitates his or her own overthrow at the hand of the next generation. So there’s that. Also, and this perhaps beyond all else, the validity of the outside stance, has, for the first time in my life, brought itself into question.
As I look harder and harder at the person I’ve turned into, I approach a place inside myself that not only requires the community of otherness, but demands that this community be nuanced and complex. A few years ago, I spent some time with an ex-girlfriend on the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington, a beautiful piece of country where she waitressed at a retreat and worked at the onsite garden growing food. In many ways, if you remove the plague of tourism, the island was a small utopia of the liberal, rural experience of which I am a part and which I have come to appreciate as a better way to live than almost any other I have experienced. It is an organic, locally oriented organism, full of kind hard-working people, most of them young and good looking, a lush environment, the ocean. It was easy to be happy there, to be content along the hard cut, rocky shoreline or walking in the dives of sunlight coming through the forest canopy and resting brightly on the fern. But what I kept noticing and thinking about was the apparent lack of anything to work against it. As a social eco-system, the island lacked diversity, real predators to keep the liberal herbivores healthy and in check. The effects of monoculture on an environment are similarly negative in the environment of the soul. The ground gets weakened. And in this way I came to miss and appreciate the backward grittiness of Montana where I used to live, the dry gravel roads and nasty rednecks revving the engines of their pickup trucks, shouting obscenities out the window at the hippies, myself included, the hippies shouting back.
In a way, I think what I'm looking for is a framework in which the outsider can maintain an heir of authenticity without collapsing into solipsism. Hegel claimed that everything was and was not its opposite, that opposing forces, when placed within the greater framework of history could, in this wide light, be seen as complimentary, working together to create the very context out of which the next step forward in the human project would inevitably arise. And I think that I believe this insofar as that which one resists provides a certain sense of justification, a vibrant friction, something real to work against, which is how we arrive at our own definitions, our understanding of who and what we are. It gives our actions meaning to have to struggle, to toil and to try. And in this specific brightness, whatever meaning or definition is achieved exists inseparably from its antithesis. It’s strange to say it, but I don’t ever want my life to be too easy, too unobstructed by the obstacles of other people or other ways of living that, although they may make my life a little harder and more complicated, lend a certain validity to it as well. I would be less without them, and knowing this partially absolves our differences, at least to some degree, without attempting to erase them.
Oddly, I am more normal than I ever imagined I’d be, more at home in my own plain skin. I agree with something a friend of mine once told me, that he was relieved to no longer feel he needed to listen to experimental jazz, that whatever it was resisting didn’t feel as oppressive as it used to, and that to continue to put on those old records for the sake of being different seemed ridiculous. A related feeling, this from a different friend, who, while standing in line at the supermarket one day and looking at some trash magazine on the rack in front of him, had the realization he had somehow, over time and without his being conscious of it, turned into simply another, normal person. He looked the same, wore the same nondescript clothing, was there for the exact same reason. Lacking any real distinction whatsoever from this random cross section of the American public in which he was simply another body, he said a feeling came over him, a sense of loss in which an old anxiety slipped slowly into calmness, and the calmness, strangely, lasted. Ten years ago, this feeling would have been impossible. I guess what I mean to say is nothing any more or less than I’ve grown up a bit and it takes coming home and seeing the old places I was young in to realize it has happened. I’m not a freak anymore. I don’t listen to punk rock. I like to garden. I have a cat. I see a lot of what I used to look like in magazine advertisements and in storefront windows hanging on the mannequins. I listen to Beyonce and Bruce Springsteen. On Sundays I watch football with my dad. More and more it seems that the harder you look, the more complete the perspective you appropriate becomes. The hipster and the everyday American are, in fact, mutually compatible, different versions of the same strange culture going on around us, echoes of a single, multifaceted locality. If it ever mattered what I wore, or what music I listened to, or what part of the counter-culture I felt affinity for, it has ceased to do so. At the end of the day I’ve had to find a way to justify the space between the person I turned into and the person I let go of in the process. And to a large extent I have. The fact that I’m just another thirty year old guy sitting in a coffee shop, no real difference worth attending to between me and any of the other guys in here, is a reality worth respecting. We’re all looking out the same bright window, wondering what the name is of the dark haired girl with glasses behind the counter across the room. We’re all grateful when she smiles. And in this light, which is the light of otherness and similarity reflecting off each other, it gets easier and easier to be here, to be anywhere, really. I, like everyone else, have this very specific history, no one else can claim it, and I do my best to make some sense of what has and hasn’t happened in my life, to tell a story that helps what I remember to mean enough to keep me relatively happy. For the most part, that’s all I do anymore. That’s all any of us do. At times it seems almost possible that this feeling will prove sustainable, at times not, but the story I’ve had to tell myself, especially here in this Wisconsin coffee shop with most of my good friends far away from me, with the girl I love also far away, is that to be estranged between two places and heading off into the unknown territory of a third, to be alone and starting over from nothing yet again, this is a struggle I wouldn’t trade for anything, not even if it were possible to do so. It makes us sentient, helps us love. When everything's been said and done, when both you and your city have changed beyond recognition, you’ve got to convince yourself, somehow, that whatever home is waiting at the end of the road will be a place whose name you know, and that because of this, you can say it as though it were your own.
